Doubting Thomas (1986) is a play on Caravaggio’s 1602 "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas". The man inserts his fingers into the crack in the road as if he does not believe it exists, as Thomas does with Jesus’ wound. The scale of geologic time is beyond his human comprehension, just as Jesus’s resurrection is a divine event beyond Thomas’s human understanding.
For the knowing reader or viewer, Thomas’s doubt in Jesus’s resurrection appears absurd. The man is standing right before him, yet still Jesus must guide Thomas’s finger into his wound for verification. For any viewer who has studied earth science in middle school, Tansey's Doubting Thomas’s doubt is also absurd.
In class, we debated whether or not we “live in the universe.” Tansey’s doubting Thomas seems skeptical as to whether he lives on the Earth. That is, in his mind, he lives in the world, the human world of cars and roads, not on a geologically active planet with active fault lines. The road and the car represent the human world, the fault line, the earth:
"The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. But the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there." (Heidegger, 172)
The modern human world takes its triumph over the earth as given. In a way, this triumph is actual—Earthrise or The Blue Marble are the literal manifestations, or culmination perhaps, of the modern world picture, the Whole Earth. But the earth never truly disappears from beneath the world, and attempts to erase the earth may result in both the earth’s and world’s near-destruction.
Just as Caravaggio’s painting renders Thomas’s doubt as absurd, so does Tansey’s painting render the artificial distinction between earth and world, nature and culture, absurd. Can anyone really doubt that the earth undergoes geologic change? Only if one lives only in the world, and not also on the earth.
